[grahamj]

[flagged]

[woodruffw]

Facebook is definitely a "great company" by Person of the Year rules[1]. There are some real whoppers on that list.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

[bee_rider]

It is great in the sense that it is very large.

[kibwen]

Great like the Great War, or the Great Depression, or the Great Irish Famine?

[paxys]

And has completely changed the world.

[righthand]

I think Google aped Facebook on world-changing by harvesting data and running algorithms to get you to scroll through a list. Changed the US might be more accurate.

[Zambyte]

Limiting the influence of Facebook to the US doesn't seem necessary.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

[JKCalhoun]

Ha ha, so it's more of a cautionary tale. I love those!

[yapyap]

haha, for real though. they poisoned the culture. of course not only them blah blah blah but they definitely played a BIG part.

[t-3]

No, they didn't. Facebook was just a less trashy, more exclusive version of myspace when it came out. Geocities, livejournal, blogger etc. were earlier iterations on the same concept - personal websites for non-techies. The only thing new about Facebook was their relative success in signing up a broader userbase, which was probably just a right-place, right-time thing of being around when computers and high-speed internet were becoming cheap and ubiquitous rather than anything different about what they were doing.

[dartharva]

It's hilarious to see people desperately put the blame on the connectivity platform when deep down they themselves know, it's the users. Just as always, the platform itself is indifferent; it is the people spewing poison.